"Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use." – Johannes Kepler.
The 1963 film, The Mouse on the Moon (sequel to better-known The Mouse that Roared), was a – not very good – satire on the space race and the Cold War. Its Irish-born author, Leonard Patrick O'Connor Wibberley, conceived of a space programme, using wine as a rocket propellant, and launched by European microstate, the "Duchy of Grand Fenwick". Yet truth is stranger than fiction and Wibberley may indeed have been a bit of a visionary.
This week the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (population 540,000), which previously dabbled in satellites, announced an ambitious programme with US and European commercial partners, to mine asteroids for rare metals and other materials that are plentiful in "near-Earth objects" – of which there are roughly 12,000.
The cost may run into tens of billions of euros but, a spokesman says, there is a market that could run to trillions for heavy metals, notably in the platinum group, which would be brought back to Earth after preliminary processing in space. Other elements – iron, nickel and tungsten – would be manufactured in space into spacecraft and tools for further exploration.
Yet if the grand duchy can do space, why not Ireland? Clearly size is not the issue. Only ambition. Of which we are in seriously short supply – our per capita research spend is only a paltry two thirds the OECD average.
Yes, Ireland is a member of the European Space Agency, at a cost of about €17.3 million a year – it has generated business worth €80 million since 2000. But it has taken until December's Innovation 2020 policy statement for a commitment to emerge even to begin talks about joining the European Southern Observatory in Chile, which is investing more than €1 billion to build the largest telescope in the world. Likewise with Cern, Europe's nuclear research centre that helped discover the Higgs Boson. First small stepsteps, but Ireland too should shoot for the stars.